Necessary Roles for a Fully Functional DevOps Team A DevOps Blog

Enabling teams are helpful as a part of a scaling strategy, as stream-aligned teams are often too busy to research and prototype new tools and technology. The enabling team can explore the new territory and package the knowledge for general use within the organization. For example, the team would discover user problems and operate and monitor the system in production.

devops team structures

In this model, development teams provide logs and other artifacts to the SRE team to prove their software meets a sufficient standard for support from the SRE team. Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production. The developer works on the application building, testing, and integration into the platform. The QA Engineer tests and ensures applications meet industry standards, while the Operations Engineer manages the infrastructure’s health checking and network communications.

Evaluate ChatOps tools and bots for the right fit

Containers remove the need for some kinds of collaboration between Dev and Ops by encapsulating the deployment and runtime requirements of an app into a container. In this way, the container acts as a boundary on the responsibilities of both Dev and Ops. With a sound engineering culture, the Container-Driven Collaboration model works well, but if Dev starts to ignore operational considerations this model can revert towards to an adversarial ‘us and them’. If only such teams recognised the importance of Operations as a discipline as important and valuable as software development, they would be able to avoid much pain and unnecessary (and quite basic) operational mistakes. Clearly, there is no magic conformation or team topology which will suit every organisation.

devops team structures

Problematic team designs (like hero teams or dedicated DevOps teams) are necessary for stable long-term solutions. You don’t need a team of each type, but any given team should resemble one of the 4 types. The http://www.vielmehr.org/?Sponsoren authors describe this as a series of magnetic poles, with each team attracted to one type. You can use your skill map when team members are looking for growth opportunities or during the hiring process.

Types of DevOps Team Structure

Platform teams work with development teams to create one or more golden pathways. These pathways don’t prevent teams from using something else but offer supported self-service products that help teams improve delivery capability. SRE – or Site Reliability Engineering – refers to the practice of offloading software from a development team to an additional team that handles operations and maintenance. It’s a team structure used religiously by Google, delivering products such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Cloud and more.

  • In this configuration, the DevOps team is responsible for all aspects of the software delivery process, including development, testing, and operations.
  • Clearly, there is no magic conformation or team topology which will suit every organisation.
  • This approach also accommodates having several separate Dev-teams that can work in parallel on partially independent products.
  • Platform teams promote good technical practices by making good decisions easier to access.
  • Release Management plays a significant role in deploying software to production, emphasizing communication between teams to ensure that there is a smooth release process.
  • In this team structure, the organization hires a DevOps consultant or team for a limited time.

Occasionally called “NoOps”, this is commonly seen in technology companies with a single, primary digital product, like Facebook or Netflix. This can even take the form of “you build it, you run it”, with the same individuals developing and operating applications. Release Management plays a significant role in deploying software to production, emphasizing communication between teams to ensure that there is a smooth release process.

DevOps team structures

The term “DevOps” was coined in 2009 by  an IT consultant and software developer. Start with the basic goals, add in wish list items, and write it all out attaching a timeframe as needed. The map should include a list of action items broken down by priority and who is responsible for completing each step.

devops team structures

Properly embracing DevOps entails a cultural change where teams have new structures, new management principles, and adopt certain technology tools. A somewhat radical approach to DevOps team structure is to avoid designating any specific engineers or team as DevOps specialists, and instead make DevOps a collective responsibility of every engineer. It’s a way of working that’s not just changing the tools we use, but the entire culture and process of development. Following the pure DevOps team structure and having the right professionals in the relevant roles allows for faster time to market, fewer errors, and a better customer experience. The Cloud Engineer is also responsible for developing cloud application deployment packages and provisioning templates, setting up cloud databases and storage, and continuously evaluating and improving the infrastructure’s performance.

One of the most significant factors to DevOps success is fostering a culture of teamwork and collaboration within your teams. Companies may jump at the opportunity to hire new software engineers when filling out a new DevOps team – but you should properly consider how you are integrating existing employees into this team. This rapid development helps companies respond to market changes faster and innovate faster than competitors.